Recruitment Priorities

Research shows employer's challenges for the year.

UK & Europe

Research from CV-Library has shown businesses’ top recruitment priorities for 2018. The study explored the views of 250 professionals with hiring responsibility and found that the main challenges that organisations are facing right now is a lack of relevant candidates, with 72.8 per cent admitting that they were suffering from this. The study highlighted sourcing candidates directly and building talent pools for the future among their priorities together with establishing a strong employer brand and succession planning.

Alongside this, 20.8 per cent are finding it difficult to deal with candidate demands, for example, when they ask for a higher salary than the company is prepared to pay. However, powering through into the New Year, 85.8 per cent said that they will be focussing on ‘quality of hire’ when recruiting. When asked what their top recruitment priorities for 2018 were, organisations cited the following:

1 Sourcing candidates directly (68.1 per cent)

2 Building talent pools for the future (65.7 per cent)

3 Investing in tools to speed up the hiring process (42 per cent)

4 Establishing a strong employer brand (40.2 per cent)

5 Succession planning (33.9 per cent)

“Getting your recruitment process right is the first thing you should think about when expanding your team,” said Lee Biggins, founder and managing director of CV-Library. “That can be anything from where you’re going to search for candidates, the tools that you’ll use to get there and how your company will come across in job postings. Without taking a step back and really thinking about why you’re recruiting, and what kind of person you’re looking for, you won’t stand a good chance of hiring the right individual for the job.”

What’s more, a staggering 90.6 per cent said that they would continue to use job boards as their top sourcing channel, followed by LinkedIn (57.9 per cent), their own career site (35.8 per cent) employee referral schemes (34.6 per cent) and aggregators (22.8 per cent).

Biggins continues: “Every business has different recruiting needs, and will focus on using different tools to reach their goals. Job boards continue to be a huge benefit to many organisations, mainly because they serve a dual purpose of being able to advertise jobs and search CVs – plus a whole lot more! It’s interesting that LinkedIn is climbing up in importance.”

Alongside this, faced with ongoing uncertainty around Brexit and the much talked about GDPR, the study asked businesses how they felt about these topics. It reveals that 70.5 per cent actually feel prepared for the changes to GDPR taking place in May 2018, which is positive news for the nation’s job hunters.

However, of the 29.5 per cent who aren’t so confident, 45.3 per cent said this was because they didn’t understand the changes, and a further 33.3 per cent because they don’t feel there is enough information out there around the topic. In terms of Brexit, just over one in five (22.4 per cent) said that uncertainty around Brexit has negatively affected their recruitment efforts in the last 12 months.

Biggins concludes: “The labour market is constantly changing and keeping on top of the latest regulations and trends is important if you want to ensure success in the future.”